Whoever is top of your list of characters will be the chosen one on the map screen. There is no clutter, no cutscenes to speak of, just your avatar winding their way around the map, scored by a typically banging Uematsu soundtrack. Everything is portrayed in a deliberately simple way. This could be a place to replenish health swap abilities add a new fiend to your bestiary, or most likely – have a fight. Once you have chosen your quartet, you are dropped onto said board: a series of squares that you colour in as you progress, encountering numbered boxes that trigger noteworthy events. It is easy to miss these biographies, but I sincerely recommend you do so, and they are superbly written and add an incredibly evocative sense of characterisation to what initially just seem like pawns in the board game stylised dungeons. Each of them is presented with Fire Emblem-esque character pics and a small paragraph which explains their motivation, their reason for existing within the universe. You are asked to pick a party of four heroes from a small initial selection. So, as you would expect, in a game world as ostensibly bare bones as this one, he nails the mechanics. Ito began working on titles in the days where technical limitations graphically meant that the gameplay was the most important aspect to consider. Sure, we all love an epic tale of good vs evil, but if the combat and various other RPG systems are not enjoyably compulsive, then any adventure is effectively over before it has begun. The genius of Dungeon Encounters is how it audaciously strips things down to the fundamental things that make role playing games fun to play in the first place. And this the weirdest, but possibly also the best RPG I have played this year. After the thick end of fifteen years, he is back. And then play some of his legendary games, and acknowledge what he brought to the genre. Go and read up on him if you don’t know who this cat is. I won’t bore you with his pedigree, as it is all out there. Many have tried, and failed to defeat them. In a nutshell, “A labyrinth appeared, and there are monsters. It made me laugh out loud, the audacity of it. When you fire it up, you are presented with the “story” – a text box with two paragraphs. The name is tongue in cheek, the punchline to some kind of RPG in-joke that we are all in on.

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